Man sentenced to 99 years after DNA solves '88 murder

By JAY STAPLETON

DAYTONA BEACH -- Fingerprint and DNA technology caught up with a Daytona Beach man who pleaded guilty Thursday to a 1988 murder and was sentenced to three consecutive life sentences in prison with no chance for parole.

Speaking almost in a whisper, Romer Lebron Williams, who is already serving a 99-year sentence for violating his probation on another burglary and sexual assault conviction in Holly Hill, pleaded guilty to raping and killing Mildred Irene Oliver, 65, by suffocation.

Williams, 40, was linked to the 18-year-old burglary, rape and slaying last year by crime-fighting DNA and fingerprint technology that didn't exist on July 7, 1988, when Oliver's body was found on the sofa where she slept in her son's home on Cottage Lane, south of Orange Avenue and west of South Beach Street.

Her son, Curtis Harmon, his wife, Shelby, and their 16-year-old daughter didn't hear anything as they slept upstairs. Their three dogs never barked. Oliver's purse and car were taken from the house but later recovered.

"We just came to a dead end," Larry Lewis, a former Daytona Beach police detective, said Thursday.

Several friends and supporters of Williams attended the sentencing Thursday, but none were there from Oliver's family. "They didn't want to have the image of seeing him in their mind," prosecutor Ed Davis said.

Although Williams would be convicted in 1989 of a burglary and sexual battery in Holly Hill that occurred a month before Oliver's murder, Lewis said there was nothing pointing to him as a suspect at the time.

"There was just nothing to go on," he said. "We didn't have the technology." But the detectives lifted prints and bodily fluids, laying the groundwork for future technological advances that would lead to Williams' conviction.

Williams was charged with the slaying in October, after a fingerprint from the woman's recovered purse was matched to him in a database during a routine check at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement Crime Lab. The purse had been found in a dumpster outside Nick's Package Store on Cypress Street, now George W. Engram Boulevard.

After reopening the case, when Daytona Beach police detectives submitted a semen sample they had recovered from the scene nearly two decades before, a match came back to Williams. A second match was made using his blood. Williams confessed when he was confronted in prison with the DNA evidence, Davis said.

Lewis, the former detective who now supervises the Automated Fingerprint Identification System for the Volusia County Sheriff's Office, was called to the older two-story house that hot July morning when Oliver's body was found with a pillow over her face. She had been beaten in the head and suffocated.

Lewis recalled thinking the suspect was short because he had used a chair to gain entry through a first-floor window. Prints were recovered from the purse, but back then, "everything was manual," Lewis said. "Chances were slim and none" of coming up with a matching fingerprint.

DNA matching technology was also limited at the time. Beyond matching blood types, Lewis said there was little detectives could do. The automated fingerprinting database that helped identify Williams is "one of the best things that's happened with law enforcement," he said.

Standing 6 feet tall, Williams waved to his family as he was led away in handcuffs. "Good luck to you, sir," Circuit Judge Joseph Will said.

Davis, the lead prosecutor, said Oliver's family got some relief knowing that Williams will never be released from prison. "They wanted closure," he said. "This obviously opened a lot of old wounds."